*"We don't want crumbs, we want to be free"- From a song by the amazing Anita Tijoux
Apologies de ante mano (beforehand), I sense an insanely long post coming on. Amazingly, I've already been working with Cultural Survival for over 2 weeks now. It's been a highly emotional experience, which I think will be apparent as I talk about it more.
The office staff and my fellow interns are really truly warm, intelligent and amazing people and I'm excited to continue to get to know them better throughout the summer. The office is super relaxed, which I'm learning is a working environment that I really value. A lot of the staff live far away and commute to the office only when they have to, so there's a changing cast of characters throughout the day(s). And just being around the office environment of a non profit provides an inside look and learning experience. Just from overhearing conversations, I'm getting a sense of the complexities of the politics of charity navigator ratings(somehow ours went down despite the % of dollars going directly to work increasing), the sometimes awkward dance with potential funders, the cycle of asking for donations, and shifting an organization to be relevant in the digital age. There are always funny surprises too, such as people leaving letters outside the office reading "What about the Indo-European tribes?" or a woman trying to donate her goat farm to us??????
I should give some background about my specific project, the Guatemala Radio Project. At the best moments, it feels like I'm part of an important struggle for human rights, a dramatic complex dance of David and Goliath. At worst, I feel like a imperialist hack, meddling where I don't belong, in a cultural context I don't fully understand, and for what, self aggrandizement? A sexy sounding job title? As if the US didn't have its own struggles and problems.
May have gotten slightly carried away with the hyperbole there...
ANYWAY, the actual projects I am working on are incredibly varied, from creating maps & video content to screening audio to translating/transcribing documents to testing a phone system to transmit radio messages over the air in real time. Lots of Spanish. Which is sorely needed, after I realized how bad things had gotten when I tried to talk to my old language partner the other night. The biggest project I am working on right now, however, involves a project to legalize community radio stations. Despite provisions in both international law and Guatemala's 1996 Peace Accords, Guatemalan Communications Law does not actually allow for frequencies to be allocated by any means other than expensive auctions. As a result, Mayan communities have limited access to media. And thereby are excluded from other important forms of information, such as news, health info, political info, especially in regions that mainly speak Mayan languages. So what we are trying to do as a last hurrah before elections in September is get the Junta Directiva of the Guatemalan National Congress to put a bill, Initiativa 4087, on the agenda to be voted on, which would provide a definition of community radio stations, creating a framework to legal challenge the shutdown of radio stations and simultaneously allow for their expansion. To do this, we are figuring out who is important politically and has power over the agenda: both political actors & sponsors of commercial radio stations, many of whom are internationally owned corporations or subsidiaries. Most of what I did today was look up the history of Coke (can anyone say depressing?) and Domino's pizza in Guatemala which made me realize how consolidated the world's corporate ownership is, yet just decentralized enough to avoid responsibility. Realizing some of this interconnection made me feel less like an interloper. Consider these linkages: Bain Capital is founded by Mitt Romney. Bain Capital buys Domino's Pizza. Domino's expands in Guate. Providing them with capital to advertise on commercial radio stations. When commercial radio station owners hear interference from other stations, they get the police to crack down on "piratas," pirates, because they have paid to use the waves and the others have not. Community radio station struggles to get back on its feet again if it can at all. Disparities in power abound, but I just indirectly connected a US presidential hopeful to a Mayan villager in about 5 giant leaps. Small freakin world.
Let me give an example that really sums up a lot of the ethical hurdles I've been pondering. This week, I was assigned the task of finding high quality examples of radio broadcasts about health that a specific funder had provided support for. In some ways, the series was great because it provided simple, easy to understand information about a variety of health problems. However, our sponsor, unnamed, happens to be founded by a conservative catholic, who is completely opposed to birth control and discussions of abortion so I was instructed to avoid anything seemingly controversial. This censorship in order to make the donor happy kind of pissed me off, especially since it was completely hypocritical since we had actually funded several spots, for example, about condom use, with their money. It also illustrated how, in order to fund something we feel is important, i.e. health information spread by radio, we covered up a discussion about the future role of women's reproductive rights in a very traditional country. Similar example of this pragmatic approach: asking Otto Perez Molina, a former military general cum politician generally believed although not convicted of crimes during the Civil War against Mayan villagers to support our campaign. This may or may not get you where you need to go, but boy it feels sleazy to me.
I got really mad though at one point when I listened to another radio broadcast from the same series about dengue fever. Follow with this example for a second. I've been thinking a lot about a study Paul Farmer did in Haiti, in which he surveyed sick patients in a rural Haitian village to see if they believed voodoo was responsible for their illnesses. A trial group who were given money for additional food and other such items fared far better in the long run, regardless of whether or not patients believed it was voodoo or microbes that made them sick. Back to the case at hand, it's clear that mosquitoes cause dengue, and in some ways those are easier to avoid than invisible microbes, alongside the eradication of sources of stagnant water. The thing that upset me though was that the underlying inequalities that lead to stagnant water in Guatemalan villages were completely unaddressed, which in a sense implied the patronizing notion that villagers only don't take action against dengue because of ignorance. How about a gigantic storage bin filled with stagnant water because your family, who despite technically having access to clean drinking water, only actually have access via a pump for 2 hours every day and therefore have no choice but to store what they can for future use? Or poor housing conditions with leaky roofs? Or how about chronic malnutrition rendering people vulnerable to disease despite lower middle income country status?
The problem is, you can't fundamentally address these inequalities without calling for a radical change to the order of things. And that's already been tried. But dark humor aside, this is one of the questions this summer's work has posed to me: is it enough to say you are working for social change if you are unwilling to deeply confront the issues that cause the problems you are trying to remediate? Are fair trade, corporate social responsibility and unenforceable human rights utter bullshit, vain attempts to justify a system that arguably isn't working for most people? Can we justifiably pressure corporations to not destroy indigenous homelands with massive infrastructure projects when our own consumption is fundamentally linked to the need for power? Is international partnership and collaboration an actual reality given the immensity of the disparities in wealth and power and influence?
I will say this: as tired and overstimulated as my brain is right now, longing for this weekend in the verdant pastures of New Jersey (intended unironically), I don't ever think I will want the sort of job I can stop thinking about when I leave the office. I doubt I'll be "selling out" for a while yet, although I think its pretty clear from the rant above that I'm not entirely sure how much more integrity the non-profit sector has anyway.
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